Those Who Walk the Flame Road
Now that Those Who Walk the Flame Road is finally out, I like a great weight has been lifted from my shoulders. The Flame Road is so long, as a story, that it’s practically a novel on its own. I thought of it well before Traveler of the Blue Road, which took a very long time to write. The Sacred Tree (my first novel) was being reprinted and I was doing book tours and interviews. People kept asking me when the next book would be coming out. I thought about the question, and The Flame Road is the result of that pondering. It came to me dimly, like the heat haze Hugo sees so often.
As for why I would write this specific story at that time, it’s hard to say. Why not Traveler of the Blue Road first? I think that this story had to be written first, before I could even attempt Traveler of the Blue Road. I didn’t know who Hugo Arayutan was before I wrote it, or why his nation was destroyed by Talsh, or the reasons why his family were massacred. Through Hugo, I came to understand the southern continent and Talsh.
I was also interested in Yogo, specifically in how it differed from New Yogo after a cultural separation of two centuries. Chagum gets to see Hoshiro in the distance in Traveler of the Blue Road, but he never gets to walk the streets there; he doesn’t know Yogo the same way Hugo does. I was eager to explore it myself.
I think that part of the reason I found forward progress on Traveler of the Blue Road so difficult was that I came to understand Hugo, his captor and eventual ambivalent ally, more than I understood what Chagum was thinking and feeling. After I finished The Flame Road, returning to Chagum’s perspective was much easier.
However, I knew from the outset that the characters from previous books in the series that people love--people like Balsa and Chagum--wouldn’t be able to make an appearance in this story. And I do consider that an unfortunate lack. All I can say is that Hugo’s story had a bearing on the series’ past, and on how things end up in Guardian of Heaven and Earth. I like Hugo a lot, and I hope that others will, too.
I didn’t write the story when I was on my book tour, but a few days after I came home, I began work on it, and it flowed out very naturally. I can never say for certain what causes an idea to form and work well and what doesn’t; the mind is a mysterious thing. I didn’t want to publish a novella with so little basis in previous stories, so when a story of Balsa’s adolescence presented itself--one with many parallels to Hugo’s--I finally understood the structure of this particular book.
I wasn’t expecting Hugo and Balsa to have so many things in common. Adolescence is a turbulent time for most people, though, so perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise.
Both of these stories take place before the final volume of Guardian of Heaven and Earth. I sincerely hope they are enjoyable!
Uehashi Nahoko
October 12, 2005
Abiko
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